What a fantastic way to spend your life until you hit your 40s and are ready to settle down and start a family.
I would love to read more coverage or updates about his life in the coming years.
I’ve thought about doing this for years, and when Covid made WFH a thing it piqued my interest even more. My partner can’t work on a boat, and we have a dog… and we love to cook… and we have too much stuff. In another life they’d write an article about me
While a 28yo with a great job may feel empowered now, I’d be worried about life changes that really impact the plans.
What if you lose your job and you can’t find the right one to keep up this very atypical lifestyle?
What if your family gets sick? What if you fall in love with a land-lover? What if you want/already had a pet?
Not to mention issues with fertility and increased probabilities of birth defects.
Good luck. Age 35+ is considered a geriatric pregnancy. Above 40 and the risks are quite large, if you even manage to get pregnant. Almost all of us are having kids way too late, biologically speaking.
Kids are a taxing experience not only financially - the myriad school activities, transportation needs, doctor appointments, keeping track of what needs to be done, it is like having another YOU.
My parents had me when they were 23, my firstborn when I was 33 and the wife 34 and then two years later, we had the other one.
> usually preferable to trying to take care of kids on a shoestring budget while still building a professional and economic foundation.
Which does not apply to the person deciding to lease space on a cruise boat for 12 years for a few hundred thousand dollars.
For me personally, I’m also child-free and I’ve lived in 7 different countries now working in tech, saving lots of money, living in various tax free locales etc.
I can't think of one compelling reason to have a child. All the reasons parent friends list off are so unappealing or selfish in their own way, I have to try and not laugh at the irony and lack of self-awareness.
Even if you're (very) rich and saved for it, the fact that less and less young people are available to create wealth means that the economy becomes inflationary, or has to use immigrants, depleting the other poor countries of their skilled workforce.
Unfortunately, a volontary "child-free" or rather childless, it's not a disease, thanks, is a kind of freeloading. Politically it's very destructive, as people without children don't want to fund infrastructure or services for them, aggravating the problem.
If you want an example, Italy is a great example of a dying society due to the lack of reproduction and the State' disinterest for it.
Who's going to take care of you when you'll be old, either physically or financially? Someone else's kid. Please let me know how this is wrong.
As for Italy, there's almost no childcare, no financial help for parents, no infrastructure for families. Pediatrics are quite expensive, and here people have children at an older age, or don't. As many interesting shops/workshops/industries are struggling to find competent workers and their owners will retire, we'll see a massive wave of value and cultural destruction there in the coming decades.
And given the wet eyes from the 40-something "childfree" women I see daily when they get a smile from my todler, I'm not sure it's all chill and cool. I see rather pain, suffering and cope.
But yeah, ok, don't try to argue man, just keep your convictions.
I don't think we've conquered biology to quite the degree needed to make that a sensible path to plan for.